I spent yesterday at a conference in Cambridge on the theme of "reputation in the age of protest", sponsored by the YouGov polling organisation and addressed by speakers as diverse as British and US government officials, corporate CEOs and Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian blogger who was nominated for the Nobel peace prize for his role in the Arab spring.

In a world where, so several people reminded the audience, reputations acquired over 20 years can be lost on Twitter in a careless five minutes, the session was a mixture of optimism and occasional alarm bells. How could it be otherwise on a day when the Hillsborough coverup was finally exposed (a Leveson scandal before Leveson!) and when a tawdry and provocative Islam-bashing US film had provoked an ugly and deadly response, equally foolish, in the Middle East?

On a lighter depressing note, we woke this morning – the conference, co-sponsored by the Guardian, continues today – to find that snatch-photos of a topless Duchess of Cambridge are being published in a French magazine. Odd in a country whose ferocious privacy laws protected the likes of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but serving no evident public interest. Alas, as with Prince Harry's willie, we will hear more spurious claims about the public right to leer from slow learners in Fleet Street.

In Cambridge yesterday all sorts of people said that governments and corporations can't control the new social media (or can they? warned others) and had better get with the programme, responding as rapidly to individual consumer complaints aired online as BP did to the Deepwater oil rig disaster, only more adroitly.

Likewise diplomats, who need to adapt to ever-faster news cycles in different time zones – which also means embracing Twitter and Facebook. But the likes of Ghonim also wondered if the flipside of a binary online world (good/bad with few nuances), where brutal online ridicule and loathing is widespread, might have quashed the noble aspirations of an Abraham Lincoln or a Martin Luther King at an early stage.

Fascinating stuff, but all tough stuff too, underpinned by the way globalisation is reinforced by internet technology at a time when the west's leadership in that globalising wave is being challenged by a resurgent Asia. But "Globalisation 2.0" also sees what Joel Rogers, director of YouGov Cambridge, calls "transnational forces of public opinion", which make it all much harder to manage in traditional ways.

In other words, individuals are more empowered by the internet, and a new global middle class can make its influence felt against tyrannical or merely incompetent government – most visibly across the Middle East since 2011 – as can society's discontented, those who have lost their jobs and prosperity thanks to globalisation's shifts of production or who can see on TV and their smartphones what others have and want it too. In the wake of global financial meltdown extremes of right and left return to challenge the politics of centrism.

Parts of yesterday's exchanges were of a familiar kind, almost pre-internet. Thus General Lord (Richard) Dannatt, former chief of the general staff, spoke of Britain's lingering postcolonial obligations in many parts of the world, but also how the risks of military intervention had often been understated since the Falklands war of 1982 revived the fashion. Politicians, solders and diplomats focus too much on immediate problems instead of horizon-scanning to nip potential problems in the bud.

The conference was backed by global polling which the Guardian has been reporting in the past few days: predictable mistrust of Mitt Romney in Europe, for example, and the divergent views on the state and social policy on the two sides of the Atlantic, but also lingering mistrust of Britain for its receding imperial role in the Middle East and north Africa to offset more positive attributes such as democracy and the rule of law. British education is a conspicuously successful feature of its "soft power" in 2012.

Politicians get a predictable kicking in terms of public trust and reputation, though someone – a corporate, not a politician – pointed out that fewer than one in three MPs were compromised by the MPs' expenses scandal and that this had not been sufficiently pointed out. Quite so. Less predictably, Gary Hoffman, the Barclays banker who stepped in to sort out tottering Northern Rock in 2008 – he was going off Barclays at the time – said he did so because he was impressed by customer loyalty.

Even as they took their savings out in panic they said they wanted to put them back again when things settled down. Yes, you can change corporate culture and correct past error, including corrupt practices but – said someone else – you have to spend more time on low-probability/high-risk problems than the less important high-probability/low-risk kind that firms tend to focus on.

And yes, you need to have established good relations with the government – or media – before a crisis breaks. It's too late when it's already under way. That was one of BP's problems in the Gulf of Mexico, compounded by CEO Tony Hayward's decision (his advisers told him to) to go on US TV in person – a Brit with an unfortunate accent and smirk – instead of putting up one of BP's tough Texan oilmen.

It's all about adaptation to change in ever-faster circumstances. The British army thinks the US army is too "kinetic" – too hyperactive – and that its own experience in Northern Ireland would allow it to run Basra with ease. But the Americans adapted more quickly and created General David Petraeus's "counter-insurgency army" to defeat al-Qaida and force the Saddamist Sunni insurgents to negotiate with the Shia majority, said Sir Robert Fry, a clever former marine general. In Syria it is the Sunnis who are the repressed majority – a mirror-image situation which is encouraging renewed militancy in Iraq.

I could write much more. Let's end on a negative note and a positive one. Fry said that the invasion of Iraq broke a 200-year British consensus about the utility of force: that the government of the day would only fight when it had to and that the military would eventually do the job honourably and well with public support.

I thought that verdict overlooked all sorts of controversy and incompetence, from the Crimean and Boer wars to the Kenyan and Malayan emergencies, but we can see that there will be fewer such interventions in future. Chinese strategic thinkers cannot believe how incompetent the US and its British allies have been in recent deployments, said Fry, unleashing forces they did not understand with awful consequences.

The day's closing session was more optimistic. Ghonim, jailed in Cairo during the Egyptian revolution, spoke of the internet as a tool which made it harder for repressive regimes to deny inconvenient facts or sweep protest under the carpet (how can it when the photos are on Facebook?) and insisted that the wisdom of crowds – "the masses always outsmart the politicians" – can prevail.

Would the Egyptian revolution have occurred without the internet? Yes, but differently and more slowly, Ghonim suggested. Are the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist forces a threat to the openness and reform which the Globalisation 2.0 world seeks? The Brotherhood is in power now, not simply criticising from the sidelines. That makes it more realistic and will make its supporters more realistic over time, he seemed to suggest.

With all the dismay evident among Muslim speakers at the murder of Chris Stevens, the sympathetic US ambassador to Libya – the provocative film is so ridiculous that it amounts to a promotion for Islam, Ghonim explained – it was hard to pretend that the road ahead would be easy. After all, Egypt and Algeria almost came to blows after online abuse between supporters of their two sides before a World Cup qualifier.

But Ghonim was warm and wise, a good speaker with whom to end the day.